Searching for a middle point between post-nuclear psychedelia and
psycho-ambient "musique concrete", German group Faust coined one of the
most powerful, dramatic and eccentric languages in modern music.

Known for the spartan editions of their records and for the ascetic modesty
of their members, whose faces were never revelead, Faust were, in a sense,
the first "lo-fi" group of rock music. Completely removed from the commercial
circuits, their career was very much underground and subdued.

Technically, the ensemble's music pushed to the extreme an aesthetics of
darkness, ugliness, fear, chaos, irrational that stemmed from expressionism,
surrealism, theater of the absurd,
Brecht/Weill's cabaret, myth of the supermensch, Wagner-ain melodrama,
musique concrete and abstract painting, all fused in a formal system that was
as much metaphysical as grotesque.
Influenced by Frank Zappa's collages, these teutonic vampires injected
angst, like burning lava, into a sound that was deliberately fastidious,
repulsive, incoherent.
Demented, demonic, paranoid, acid and violent, their compositions constitute
a puzzle of sonic boutades and hermetic puns.
Their opus was a black mass that deteriorated into "happening".
However, behind the surface, Faust's music hid a moving vision of the human
condition, one of the most lyrical in the entire history of rock music.
Their visions of hell represent the noblest testament that came out of
progressive-rock.

In 1969 Werner "Zappi" Diermaier (drums), Hans Joachim Irmler (keyboards)
and Arnold Meifert (percussions) were playing in Campylognatus Citelli.
In Hamburg they hooked up with three musicians from Nukleus:
Jean Herve` Peron (bass), Rudolf Sosna
(guitar) and Gunter Wuesthoff (saxophone).
The six became Faust and, helped by journalist Uwe Nettelbeck,
set up their studio in the nearby village of Wuemme.

Their first album, Faust
(Polydor, 1971), their (and one of rock music’s) masterwork, contains three
lengthy musical digressions.
These Dadaist collages and explorations in musique concrete make a very free
use of "found sounds." Why
Don’t You Eat Carrots, the opening track, begins with a piercing,
radioactive whistle, which leaks into two “classic” sixties snippets, Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and All You Need Is Love by The Beatles. Both are demoniacally distorted.
From there, a free flow of gags commences, which includes cabaret piano and a
brass band, which show an obvious
Frank Zappa influence, and voice distortion and
electronics derivative of Stockhausen. The opening track is a demented
jazz-rock jam crushed by pneumatic hammers, which contains cosmic hisses and
crowded thumps, all of which is dominated by a collegiate choir. Eventually
everything fades into nothingness: a cosmic wind brings echoes and fragments of
the previous portion of the song along with pieces of a lost conversation;
these are coupled by frightening blasts of radiation.

Following the clustered first piece is Meadow Meal. The
second track opens with a dense, chaotic field of electronic manipulations,
percussion, and “concrete,”
unorthodox noises from ordinary instruments. This dissonant chamber music sets
the stage for a dramatic huddle of voices. Then, suddenly, the music launches
into a relentless flight of blues-rock guitar, which sounds like the Grateful Dead. The song, as
grotesque as it is desperate, is crowned with a church organ, which pounds in
the sudden silence, like a prayer that is, like the song, drunk but moving. The
meaning of this absurd piece is cryptic, but not impossible. Faust coexist with
philosophers as amateurs, but there message is less developed and more
childish. The music of Faust, especially in this particular work, is chamber
music so degraded that its identity is all but lost. This confusion, though, is
able to communicate a message: from chaos emerges order. Strangely, as the
piece becomes even more bogus, the ridiculousness of each ensuing portion of
the song makes everything that came before it seem rational and ordered.

As demonstrated by their masterpiece and the closing song on
the album, Miss Fortune, Faust’s
imagination held room for even more reckless composition. The song opens with a
crescendo of typical stormy Teutonic tribalism ("motorik" rhythm and
drumming and violent distortions), from which springs a surreal duet between a
wild jazz-rock guitar and an acoustic, psychedelic, strumming flamenco guitar.
The chaos falls, and begins an eerie silence, which is suddenly interrupted by
the lullaby of a drunken muezzin, itself accompanied by only the thread of a
malignant synthesizer and the shaky basis of a plan, with the rhythm section
soon taking it to the speed of a waltz. After a few seconds, a sweeping,
astronomical hurricane is unleashed. Once the spasms subside, though, there remains
only one song, seeming to come straight out of an asylum (and it is multiplied
by a thousand echoes from that asylum’s cells). In this tortured section of the
song, loud, squeaking voice recordings are launched at crazy speeds, and they
are punctuated by horrendous music hall piano and interrupted and overtaken by
fragments from a tape-grinding organ. After a short interlude of silence, the
finish is soft, magical and delirious.
The overwhelming masterpiece ends with two alternating voices relaying a
medieval fairytale over a subtle guitar. This fairytale, and one verse in
particular, sums up Faust’s entire, complex philosophy, dealt with throughout
the album: “Are we supposed to be or not to be.” With this closing song, Faust
had managed to blend the grotesque, the everyday,
and the transcendent into a colossal contradiction, a catastrophic imbalance,
which serves as a summation of the human condition that in a way is more
accurate than any rational discourse.

The album’s overwhelming feeling is one of loneliness,
helplessness, and despair.
The sonic cyclones loom over the gaunt, threatening fate of human existence.
The humanity that transpires from the album’s overwhelming message of
apocalypse is both physical (the Germanic accents) and mental (all the paranoia
of modern man), inexorably doomed to crumble against the rugged ramparts of
history. Faust, Goethe-ian and Wagnerian, raise a solemn hymn to universal
defeat, which sublimates the titanic human adventure. Humans who, while
admiring the immense universe, wonder doubtful and fearful "Are we
supposed to be or not to be?" are the most poignant vision handed down by
Germanic rock. The final lines of the record ("... and at the end realize
that/ nobody knows/ if it really happened") beat any lyric ever written by
Bob Dylan or Nick Cave. This is simply
great poetry.

So Far (1972),
contained structured songs rather than free-form jams. It did not carry the
staggering momentum of its predecessor, and confirmed the desecration of the
quintet. The album is saved thanks to the obsessive paranoia of It's A Rainy Day, the Zappa-esque
imagination of I've Got My TV, and
the electronic sabbat, Mamie Is Blue,
but too many songs are simply ambiguously trivial or clearly derivative.

The third album, Tapes
(Virgin, 1973), is presented as a collection of 26 unpublished and “lost”
songs, but in fact it was written and recorded in Oxford (not so "random"
as the legend would have it be). The nature of the disorganized collection is
simply the nature of Faust. These "tapes,” in reality, testify to the
creativity of the ensemble in the mature stage.

Fifty seconds of dissonant piano clusters and a few seconds of chaos lead
(at minute 1:20) to a serene Syd Barrett-ian fairy tale. Three minutes later
the song has turned into a romantic guitar theme. At 5:20 a Tibetan-like orgy
of droning voices and primitive percussions leads into a Gong-ian vaudeville,
which, in turn, collapses in a saxophone-driven jam. The refrain of the song
returns, repeated for several minutes over and over again. At 14:25 a bit
of musique concrete a` la Pink Floyd's Alan's Psychedelica Breakfast
leads into a mesmerizing fanfare/march of cacophonous proto-industrial music.
Orchestral dissonances, that connect to the beginning, and distorted tape
music take over for a few minutes of absolute chaos.
At 23:30 a clarinet and a saxophone bark at the moon over a jazzy bass line.
After several minutes of casual sounds, at 35:10 a new song appear.
The album ends with two minutes recited in French over an acoustic guitar:
again, Faust gives meaning to the preceding chaos by pausing and reflecting
in a melancholy tone.
In the age of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells this was actually a "hit"
of progressive-rock (50,000 copies sold in one year).

Faust's second masterpiece, IV (1973), or, better, its tour de force
Krautrock, is a bleak, menacing, agonizing whirlwind of
galactic magma that consume thermonuclear energy.
If the Indian mystics wanted to become one with Brahman,
Faust the atheists tried to become one with the Big Bang.

(Translated from the Italian by Troy Sherman)

Even while they were enjoying their moderate success in
Britain, Faust were dying of starvation. Following their third record, they put
out a collaboration with the violinist Tony Conrad, Outside The Dream Syndicate (Caroline,
1973 - Table of the Elements, 1996). The album contains two long tracks, each
twenty minutes in length: From the Side
of Man and Womankind and From the
Side of the Machine. The reissue adds From
the Side of Woman and Mankind, which is almost identical to the first
track.

In the end of their sullen career, before the dissolution,
came Faust’s fourth album, IV
(Virgin, 1973). Often containing much calmer music, it is at times near Syd Barrett and folk music,
yet it is still haunted by electronic noise. The highlight is Krautrock, the opening suite: a dark,
rhythmic noise (a hideous derivative of psychedelic ragas of the Velvet Underground)
accompanied by miasmas,
rises in a deadly and terrible fashion. The song takes the listener in
convulsions of pressing agony. The mind explodes in imminent orgy, and the
sonic lysergic trip is more and more cut off from all time. It is a surreal
concentration of psychic earthquakes which can contact the origins of the
cosmos. If Hindus were trying to merge their minds with Brahman, in this
opening song Faust attempted to merge theirs with the huge big bang. Their rock
is a hellish version of kosmische musik: it contains no celestial calm, but
instead a huge scary maelstrom of galactic magma,
frantically destroying the matter of the universe.

The point on the album of the lowest depression is the most
touched Jennifer, a soft ballad that
is launched into a vortex of a metaphysical suspense. Läuft plays the part of a parody of the Parisian chanson, but
accidentally becomes a piece of ambient music (five years before it was
invented by Brian Eno). Just A Second opens with one of their
most pressing riffs, but lasts only a minute, before you fade into a glitch
sent in by loops of a forgotten, frantic piano sonata of Picnic on a Frozen River.
The album is even able to grasp circus music: the futuristic music-hall of Giggy Smile. This exuberant music (which at one point pulls out
a riff worthy of ZZ Top
and a circus theme worthy of Frank Zappa)
does, however, seem a bit out of place in the midst of such an emotional
cemetery. Frank Zappa is indeed the only musician to which you can owe this
operation. The "fragments" ideally continue the work of
demystification of genres which began on We're
Only In It For The Money,
and the marching bands seem like half-serious appendices of Uncle Meat.

Following IV,Faust broke up, leaving behind at least two masterpieces worthy of
worship (the first and fourth albums).
The legend of the group is perhaps the most misunderstood in all of rock.
Ironically, however, the only album to receive even minimal accolades was the
worst. None of the four great music encyclopedias of the 1990s (Rolling Stone,
Penguin, Viking, All Music Guide, each of about a thousand pages) mentions
them.

The album contains two lengthy tracks, each over twenty minutes long:
From the Side of Man and Womankind and
From the Side of the Machine.
The reissue adds From the Side of Woman and Mankind,
which is almost identical to the first one.

Faust's fifth record, recorded in Munich in 1973, never materialized, but what
survived eventually surfaced on
Return Of A Legend - Munich and Elsewhere (Recommended, 1987). There
are only six tracks: Munic/Yesterday,
Don't Take Roots,
Meer,
Munic/Other,
Baby,
We Are The Hallo Men.
It sounds like this would have been a retreat to the compromise sound of
So Far.
The Last LP (Recommended, 1988) contains the
eight "party tapes", originally recorded in 1971 and partially released on
singles and EPs. These are not essential items. In fact, this is the one
disposable album in Faust's early discography.
To further confuse the discography, these two albums will be partially (not
completely) collated on 71 Minutes (Recommended, 1990), and with
slightly different titles.

Faust's resurrection began in 1990, at the "Prinzenbar" in Hamburg. A subsequent
live performance at London's "Marquee Club" and a tour in California
drew enough interest to secure a recording contract.
Diermeier and Peron not only reconstituted the band but, finally, began to
perform live. They showed a predilection for chainsaws and jackhammers,
whose sounds are captured on
Concerts: Vol. 1 (Table of the Elements, 1994) and
Concerts: Vol. 2 (Table of the Elements, 1994).

Faust returned to the studio for the first time in 20 years, but, in keeping
with their unfriendly tradition, the notes of
Rien (Table of Elements, 1995) are eight blank pages: not a single word.
was the "reunion" album.
Rien is, de facto, an anthology of unreleased material, edited by a
extraordinary exegete Jim O'Rourke.
The limit of this work is precisely that it sounds more like a O'Rourke remix
of Faust than... Faust (Diermeier and Peron).
The second (untitled) track sounds like
Chrome's manic version of space-rock
(replete with Helios Creed's trademark space guitar) before it abruptly ends
in silence (Faust would not have ended it this way).
Long Distance Calls In The Desert toys with found sounds.
Eroberung der Stille, Teil II recalls Edgar Varese's early
noise/electronic experiments, while the fifth (untitled) track recalls
early Pink Floyd with a bee-like trumpet as the main distraction/attraction
and a long, droning coda.
Eroberung der Stille Teil I is very primitive musique concrete for
collage of voices, found sounds and Gorecki's "Symphony 3".
Everything is well crafted and carefully recorded, but that "is" the problem.
O'Rourke destroys Faust's original "kraut" spirit: mad, unpredictable,
incoherent. Here, Faust has become an ensemble that drags on forever, working
on very simple ideas.
Faust's music was cryptic, not meaningless:
Rien is not cryptic, it is simply over-indulgent, which is... meaningless.

More speculation followed.
The mini-album Untitled (Klangbad, 1996) contains unreleased tracks,
which are mainly alternate takes of very minor songs: a shameless rip-off.
No less pathetic are the 1973 sessions collected on London 1-3. The CD
reissue of this record, BBC Sessions (ReR, 2001), adds what was left
out of 71 Minutes.
It is hard to believe that even the most alternative band of the 1970s
eventually ended up trying to cash in on its belatedly achieved popularity.

Unlike Rien, which was mainly a collection of unreleased material, and
the live albums, You Know Faust (ReR, 1997)
marks Faust's earnest return to the musical scene.
The line-up consists of Diermaier, Irmler and Peron (although Irmlet did
not attend the recording sessions).
Their art has matured towards a more austere and severe form, which allows for
only minimal gestures, far from the melodic/rhythmic conventions of popular
western music. The tone of their performance (even in the most provocative
pieces) is almost classical: sparse, light, elegant, graceful.
What strikes as utterly disorienting is the fragmentation (a few of the tracks
last only a handful of seconds), as if the composers need not elaborate on
their vague gestures, vagueness being the ultimate message.
The spirit of the operation is almost "ambient": more evocative than telling,
more in the background than in the foreground.
Such is the case of fundamentally uneventful tracks: the
cyclic patterns of Hurricane,
the funereal trumpet fanfare of C Pluus,
the organ requiem of L'Oiseau.
Only two compositions connect with their dadaistic roots:
Na Sowas (14th track, and 14 minutes), a demonic dance that riddles
a syncopated "robotik" rhythm with a carnival of sound effects (but after six
minutes doesn't seem to know where to go next), and
Teutonen Tango (16th track, seven minutes), a demented "Ubu-billy" with
absurd French voices. De facto, they both remix themselves in their codas.
Other accomplished tracks end up betraying a lack of inspiration.
Liebeswehen (eight track),
an the epic revision of Duan Eddy/Sandy Nelson conventions, and
the humorous sketch of Men From The Moon hardly belong to the rest
of the album: they were cute leftovers that the band felt to publish.
What is missing is the metaphysical grandeur that used to complete their
cacophonous raids. Here, there is only experimentation on timbres and textures.
Interesting, clever, stimulating... but for its own sake.
(The CD includes 17 tracks, but lists 26 titles. Obviously, there is not a
one-to-one correspondence. Most reviewers used the first 17 titles: for this
review, instead, I identified the tracks according to their length as provided
by the band).

Peron was replaced by bassist Michael Stoll, and Faust proceeded to release
Faust Wakes Nosferatu (1997), which documents a live improvisation
for Murnau's film, and Edinburgh Live (1998), that collects eight
new compositions.

At last, Ravvivando (may 1999) continued the program of You Know.
Irmler is much more active
This is far less idiosyncratic, absurdist, eccentric music than the original
Faust.
These tracks (ostensibly there are twelve, but organized in three suites)
are monoliths.
Ein Neuer TagDr' HanslCarousel IIApokalypse
motorik Wir Brauchen Dich #6D.I.G.Four Plus Seven Means ElevenDu Weisst SchonTake CareLivin' TokyoSpiel
motorik T-Electronique

The Land of Ukko and Rauni (2000) documents a Faust show
in Helsinki. The line-up was
Lars Paukstat (percussions), Stoll, Lobdell and Diermeir.

In the age of "unreleased", "rare", "remixed" tracks, the band will
dig out of the garbage can the tracks for Patchwork 1971-2002 (2002)
and will ask friends to create Freispiel (2002), a remix
of Ravvivando. Bad habits spread to intelligent musicians too.

Hans-Joachim Irmler's solo work Lifelike (Staubgold, 2003), the first
solo album by any Faust member, originally a soundtrack for a museum exhibition,
is closer in spirit and sound to Hans Joachim Roedelius than to Faust.

The triple-disc In Autumn (2007), featuring Diermeir but not Irmler and
documenting terrible live performances, is a ridiculous swindle.

Disconnected (Art-Errorist, 2007) is a Faust album only in name,
because Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton and
Colin Potter
took some raw Faust recordings
and turned them into the final product.

Kleine Welt (Ektro, 2008) documents live concerts of 2006 by the line-up of Jan Wolbrandt on drums, Michael Stoll on bass, Lars Paukstat on percussion, Steven Wray Lobdell on guitar, and Hans Joachim Irmler on keyboards.
Od Serca Do Duszy (Lumberton Trading Company, 2008) documents a live
2006 concert by the line-up of
Zappi Diermaier on drums, Jean-Herve Peron on guitar, Amaury Cambuzat on keyboards.

Paper Factory is an ensemble comprising Faust member Hans-Joachim Irmler on electronic keyboards, Mike Adcok on piano and accordion, Clive Bell on flutes, Sylvia Hallett on violins, Mike Svoboda on trombone. Their first recording, Schlachtfest Session 1 (Klangbad, 2008), sounds
like a lighter, humorous version of Irmler's solo Lifelike. The ambient
ethnic jazz fusion is particularly effective in the ten-minute
Hinter dem Eisentor.

Faust's C'est Com...Com...Complique (Bureau B, 2009) featured
Herve Peron and Werner "Zappi" Diermaier plus Ulan Bator's Amaury Cambuzat.
The material is second-rate, basically an album built to justify the
nine--minute Kundalini Tremolos, one of their best ventures into
trance.

Hans-Joachim Irmler's Faust announced that
the double-disc Faust Is Last (2010),
recorded between 2006 and 2008, would be their last release, while the
Jean Hervé Peron's and Zappi Diermaier's
Faust released their fourth and possibly best album,
Something Dirty (Bureau B, 2011), this time featuring guitarist
James Johnston (Gallon Drunk) and
Geraldine Swayne on pianos, synthesizers, guitar, organ, vocals, and
psalterion, with songs that are
both vibrant (Something Dirty and Tell the Bitch to Go Home)
and meticulously theatrical
(Lost the Signal and La Sole Doree).